An ongoing effort to improve traffic safety by creating as-safe-as-practical traffic conditions with regard to safety of personnel involved in traffic facilitation, monitoring and/or enforcement of traffic laws and regulations generally results in a multitude of instructions, regulations and laws intended to motivate drivers to notice the traffic facilitators working in public traffic areas, reduce the driving speed (“slow down”), and/or increase the clearance between the moving traffic and traffic facilitators substantially by vacating the proximal traffic lanes executing the lane change operation (“move over”) if safe and/or practical. The above desirable behaviors have been, over past decades, codified in a plurality of state laws and regulations collectively known as “Slow-Down-Move-Over” (“SDMO”) requirements.
Informative overview summaries of this constantly evolving area of regulatory materials on jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction basis (e.g. state-by-state basis in the US—excluding Washington D.C., or province-by-province basis in Canada—excluding Yukon) may be found on the Internet, for example by consulting www.drivinglaws.aaa.com/tag/move-over-law/or www.moveoverlaws.com (Jan. 8, 2016). Even a cursory review of this material by an interested practitioner may generate an impression of present good intentions but apparent lack of uniformity and conceptual clarity of approaches to advance enforcement and public acceptance of the SDMO traffic requirements.
Similarly, in spite of significant development of imaging technologies for traffic studying, monitoring and enforcement, substantially no generally-accepted standards and practices have been established or adapted specifically for detecting, collecting, processing, and/or prosecution the SDMO requirements internationally (e.g. Canada and US), nationally (e.g. US, Canada, Mexico, and/or on state/provincial/territorial basis. The current embodiments of the present invention have been specifically constructed with flexibilities and options directed to serve the variety of SDMO monitoring and prosecution needs of the as large as practical set of states, provinces, territories, and/or municipalities of the United States of America and, more inclusively, North America extending to the practical limits of uniformity and standardization of traffic-related equipment and infrastructure.
In general, devices and methods of the embodiments of the present invention have been directed to detections of presence of pertinent traffic participants in particular areas of the traffic scenes (e.g. inside of the boundaries of particular traffic lane) and overall behavior of subjects involved in the pertinent traffic-related situations (e.g. intentions and/or signals to vacate the particular lane of traffic or speed reduction) which may be used for subsequent processing of collected data either locally (e.g. automatically in real time) or remotely for potential purposes of further corrective actions and/or potential future prosecution.
In addition, the methods and devices of the embodiments of current invention have been conceptualized, designed, and arranged for an enhancement of the security and confidentiality of the collected information, including but not limited to the traffic information, the information on traffic participants either actively or passively contributing to the pertinent traffic conditions, and/or accidental bystanders serendipitously present and recorded at the traffic locations and the traffic scenes of interest for the SDMO behavior monitoring and/or prosecuting.